1. Literary techniques
The White Tiger

2. The White Tiger
Symbolism

3. Motif Symbol A recurring element in a work.
A symbol is an object (not necessarily tangible) that represents, stands for, or suggests an idea, visual image, belief, action, or material entity

4. Animal Imagery
Adiga uses a variety of animals, both domestic and wild, to illustrate his points about India’s politics and culture. India is portrayed as a “jungle,” with different levels of society.
Some are on the hunt for prey and other simply avoid being consumed. “Eat or be eaten up” is the only way to live in India.

5. The White Tiger
“In any jungle, what is the rarest of animals – the creature that comes along only once in a generation?”…”The white tiger.”…”That’s what you are, in this jungle.” (p. 35)
1. The tiger is a fierce and majestic creature, but the white tiger is an animal of rare colouring. It is exceptional, as is Balram…to a certain extent…
2. Light and dark in contrast
Balram = a representation of Indian men in general – containing both Light and Dark, full of contrasts and contradictions.

6. The Lizard In India, considered to be a coward if scared of lizards
Representative of the inner Balram
When threatened, the lizard can detach its tail in order to escape confinement. This is what Balram does on a couple of levels:

7. The Lizard
First, he divides himself morally and vacillates (go back and forth) between feeling remorse and having no remorse for his deeds. He makes the decision to rob and murder Ashok because Ashok was willing to sacrifice Balram after Ashok’s wife runs over a child in the street.
Second, after Ashok’s death, Balram detaches himself, finally and completely, from his family and escapes from Delhi to the safety of Bangalore.

8. The Lizard
Early in the story, Balram’s father kills the lizard at Balram’s school against Balram’s entreaties to let the lizard go. It is his father’s single act of courage: “My whole life, I have been treated like a donkey. All I want is that one son of mine — at least one — should live like a man.” (p.30)
The sad irony is that Balram, who couldn’t bear to see the lizard be smashed, was able to later smash Ashok’s skull with little difficulty.

9. The Rooster and Rooster Coop
Roosters rarely take the opportunity to escape, even when the door is open, because they really have everything they need at hand — hens and food. There are no further temptations for them beyond the cage. As long as they serve their purpose, they get to eat.
When they are no longer useful, they are eaten. This is Balram’s theory of social class. (p.64)

10. The Rooster and Rooster Coop
When Balram becomes a driver, he has everything he needs, money and food. With a full belly, Balram should be satisfied staying at this level.
“The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy ... Here in India we have no dictatorship. No secret police ... That’s because we have the coop.” (p.175)

11. The Rooster and Rooster Coop
This is the old social truth of India. People were jammed and confined inside narrow social boundaries and had no room to move about and no hope for change. The roosters waited patiently to be cut into small edible pieces.

12. The Rooster and Rooster Coop
Balram represents the scores of people who are up-rooted and transported to city centres to work in call-centres, in IT and in industry. Once they escape the rooster coop, they never want to go back. But, to stay there, they sacrifice many things and people along the way.
The rooster represents a wake up call for India and China and the rest of the world. Adiga has opened the cage door to allow inspection and introspection.

13. The Water Buffalo
A water buffalo was kept by every family in the Darkness. They fed it, took care of it, and used its milk as nourishment and to sell at markets for extra cash.
In the Darkness, the lives of many families (including Balram’s) revolved around keeping the water buffalo fed, clean and healthy, sometimes at the expense of the families’ own well-being, simply because “all their hopes were concentrated in her fatness.” (p.20)

14. The Water Buffalo
The water buffalo also represents an endless cycle of dependency and interdependency that no one seems able to break. The only way to do so is to compromise your family, just as Balram eventually does.

15. The Water Buffalo
In this way, the water buffalo embodies the rules of the rooster coop. Those who ignore the water buffalo, or run away from the Darkness, do so by sacrificing their relatives. The Darkness may be a poor and painful place, but it is a familiar way of life and it includes strong allegiance to the family. Neglecting the water buffalo is tantamount to butchering the family.
“…only a man who is prepared to see his family destroyed – hunted, beaten and burned alive by the masters – can break out of the coop…It would, in fact, take a White Tiger.” (176-77)

16. The Number Four
The number four is symbolically significant because it not only represents the four seasons and the four elements of life (earth, water, air, fire), but it also provides us with our point of reference, the four points of the global compass: North, South, East, West.
The idea is that if we know where we are, we can know where we are going.

17. The Number Four
Adiga uses the number four to link the known to the unknown, truth to illusion, and past to future:
The Buffalo, the Stork, the Wild Boar and the Raven
Balram has four names: Munna, Balram, the White Tiger and his last, self-given name, Ashok Sharma.

18. The Number Four
Despite Adiga’s use of the number four, Balram is constantly naming three of everything, leaving the fourth unidentified:
Balram refers to his favourite four poets: Rumi, Iqbal, Mirza Ghalib, but can’t remember the fourth.
Revolutionaries who fought to free their country’s slaves: Alexander the Great, Lincoln, and Chairman Mao. Balram considers the possible mention of Hitler as the fourth, but he is not really sure.
Three traditional myths that are no longer solid supports of the country: God, Gandhi, and family. He says that the fourth myth, the one that might rescue today’s India, is still unknown.

19. The Number Four
This is Adiga’s point: the future is, as yet, unrevealed. Balram acts as all three fates:
He is the witness observing the current situation.
He is the prophet forewarning the possibility of doom.
Balram is also the agent who may himself lead the country into disaster.
He is poet, the revolutionary, the new ‘myth’ that will rescue today’s India!

20. The Red Bag
Red bag, they should have said. Without the colour, the information is all but useless, isn’t it? No wonder I was never spotted. (p.32)

21. It makes me happy to see a chandelier
It makes me happy to see a chandelier. Why not, I’m a free man, let me buy all the chandeliers I want. For one thing, they keep the lizards away from this room. It’s the truth, sir. Lizards don’t like the light, so as soon as they see a chandelier, they stay away. (p.99)
The Chandelier

22. The Chandelier
To Balram they are a significant symbol of status and freedom.
They also represent light…when Balram turns on his cobwebby fan though, he disperses the light with darkness to give a strobe effect.
Motif of the juxtaposition of Light and Dark…as a metaphor both for India and for man.

23. Metaphor

24. The Black Fort Unattainable, a dream Within sight Climbable
pp 21, 40, 86 .

25. The River Ganges
Holy, many believe that life is not complete until one has bathed in the river’s waters
Filth, disease – page 12
The fecundity it brings to its banks brings wealth, not to those who live there, but to those who ‘eat up’ the profits from it and live on the coast – in the Light.

26. Irony Contradictions between literal and apparent meanings
What he says is different to what you understand to be truly going on
Helps characterise Balram as the White Tiger figure… someone who builds a deep resentment and refusal to continue along the path of his ancestors, and who has the guts or ‘belly’ to make a move out of it